See there’s the problem right there. They shouldn’t have sold the robot. It should have been a subscription model, with micro transactions. That would have kept the investors flocking in.
I’d like to say this is sarcasm, but unfortunately it’s the most likely lesson these ghouls will learn from this.
Daily slot check in, pull the arm and the eyes display the slots. Ez money make me a CEO.
Its 2024 and you cannot use a product the way you want to. Can’t you just use openAI api as the backend??
What’s the opposite of “eating the onion”? I thought this was satire for sure.
Pooped the onion? Honestly, I’ve only ever seen these kinds of stories as notTheOnion.
wouldnt it be not eating the onion? or shoving up your rear end
winning a vickrey auction
Onionphobia I guess.
I hate people.
So does the startup.
Buy anything that must login to a web server not located at your house and expect it to get bricked when that server doesn’t work anymore. Simple…don’t. Plus they are clearly gaining something from you.
Shit, I’ve a house?! Where have you been all my life? /s
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
You can do anything if you complain loud and long enough
thanks for the good laugh
It is sad to give your child emotional support robot to begin with.
I get the feeling, but tools come in many shapes and forms. If this was truly helpful for any kid, it’s a fucking tragedy that’s bricked.
I assume it relies on external servers for processing, so it was a matter of time though.
But the short-lived, expensive nature of Moxie is exactly why some groups, like right-to-repair activists, are pushing the FTC to more strongly regulate smart devices
Which will be harder in the next 4 years. On the other hand, maybe it sensibilizes more towards cloud-indepent operation and Open Source.
Will it also brick for kids with refunds?
Will it brick the kid?
Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.
All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.
That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.
I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.
Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.
This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️
I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.
If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.
There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.
If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.
Not just Foss, but also open hardware.
And Lemmy mods: stop banning open hardware projects. Just because we happen to sell stuff doesn’t make us spam
They are considering it making it open source, among other options to keep the robots alive
Awesome if that ends up happening.
Settle down there, that’s not what all the headlines say. How will the pitchforks get used unless the headline is 100% negative?
To be fair, it’s bad… I’m not arguing against that.
For big contracts between companies, this is actually done, in a way, through source code escrow. Would be nice if this was a thing for consumers as well.
um, my favorite streamer Pirate Software says it is impossible for corporations to provide code to extend the life of anything
Why?
They sometimes use the IP of others and it can be a real headache or impossible to get permission from everyone.
This argument seems hollow, releasing source code is not an all or nothing situation. They can just release what they are allowed to, and let the community replace the missing stuff.
Releasing anything is better than releasing nothing and letting the community reverse engineer everything instead of just some third-party libraries.
Understandable
While I agree in principle, a blanket enforcement seems like a great way for companies to purposely tank smaller entities just to get hold of their code/IP. Alongside this, it probably doesn’t help to just release the code, when these devices will run on web services, or perhaps even proprietary tech.
In this case, it would be a great way to dissolve the company. Switch the endpoints over to a custodian project, have the servers owned and run through a community campaign, and open source the code and artifacts.
In my ideal world, IP and copyright wouldn’t exist at all, but obviously that won’t happen in my lifetime.
Neither would my suggestion of releasing any defunct software as GPL, sadly.
The codebase the would be a great start, even if it previously ran on proprietary tech, having the codebase at least allows engineers to pull out the proprietary hooks and rebuild them to work with something open source.
We need a right to repair but for software, sadly that also is a pipe dream in our current environment.
Companies already tank smaller entities all the time just to have less competition. I don’t think OC’s suggestion could accelerate this in any way. They’re already going at full speed.
Man those parents. Oof.
I do not wanna be in their shoes.
Telling your kid that needed an emotional support robot friend that the robot friend is going to take a nap for a long time and might not wake back up? Ooo boy.
Helping a kid through a divorce is hard enough. This seems like a terrifying nightmare.
A parent with autism is probably seeing it as another “could’ve been” that they get to toss out now, likely paid for by insurance.
I wonder how big that pile of products is, failed crap marketed to insurance companies and parents for autistic kids.
Big business.
I would like to think the community could work out the API’s and replicate them on a free server, but if this was just a glorified Alexa box, there is probably a lot more server-side processing that needs to happen to keep it running.
Welcome to the “brand new world” of IOT hardware where you are the product and continued service depends entirely on how you can be monetized.
I’m assuming it runs on AI and the company has to provide the backend. So yeah, if you purchase something that requires a company’s infrastructure, it can certainly be bricked.
Which is why you should only buy stuff that relies on local APIs and on board processing.
Self-hosting makes more sense every day.
What are the genuine use cases for such a robot? For when the kid has issues communicating with other people?
A robot has infinite patience and will never get mad or bully a child for fun. Ideally, this should also be true of a parent, but it’s not. From a less grim angle, a robot doesn’t have other responsibilities like work.
For a kid who feels too shy to talk to people, a robot can be good for practice. But it requires a lot of attentiveness from parents to make sure the child doesn’t become dependent and moves on to taking to people once they get their confidence.
Back when drag was a kid, we used imaginary friends instead of robots. But a lot of parents and children don’t believe in imaginary friends, which is a shame, because robots are a lot more expensive.
Yeah, kids focusing too much on their robot instead of other people is one of my concerns.
A robot can teach the kid all the right things, but it will never give a kid the real social experience, which can get rough if a kid is not sufficiently exposed to it right from the start. Even now, as real human communication moves online in a large part, children grow up increasingly socially anxious and maladapted. From that position, I’m quite uncomfortable with “study from home” trends as well, as school is one of the key venues for IRL child-child interactions.
On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if all kids first developed with perfect robots and then started interacting with one another. But that’s a subject for yet another unethical experiment.
It’s also probably a developmental aid also. As someone with a child, you’d be surprised at how laser-focused parents can be with regards to developmental delays or issues and ensuring that their kids have every opportunity to meet specific milestones.
IMO while it’s absolutely not a replacement for human interaction, something like this with the right backing could be very useful to a lot of kids that need additional help.
I see!
